The present disclosure relates to the field of computers, and specifically to the use of computers in electronic financial transactions. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to the use of computers in detecting money laundering activities in micro-commerce transactions.
Micro-commerce is defined as electronic commerce that uses transactions that each have a value that is below a predefined limit (e.g., less than $1.00 USD). That is, micro-commerce utilizes micro-payments (e.g., less than $1.00 USD) to pay for each of highly numerous (i.e., higher than some minimum quantity, such as 1,000 transactions per hour) transactions. One example of micro-commerce is downloading music, in which millions of consumers may download a million songs every day, with each song download costing 99 cents. In another example of micro-commerce, consumers of applets or other small software packets may pay a small amount (e.g., less than 1 cent) for each use of such software.